Director/ Senior Director, Lab Platform Engineering

Title: Director/ Senior Director, Lab Platform Engineering Location: Cambridge, MA USA; San Francisco, CA USA

Your Impact at LILA

Lila is hiring a Director of Lab Platform Engineering to lead the team that builds and operates the hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure behind our automated labs. You will own the platform strategy for a fleet of distributed lab sites and lead the engineers who make new sites come online reliably and repeatably.

Lab Platform Engineering builds and supports the platforms and software that keep Lila's AI Science Factory™ running: bare metal clusters, cloud infrastructure, secure identity and secrets services, resilient storage, and the APIs and tooling that let scientists and engineers ship software to production. Every robot, instrument, and lab workflow depends on these systems.

This is a leadership role on a team being built now. You will grow the organization to 10 to 15 engineers, set multi-year technical direction, and partner with robotics, lab operations, research, and security leaders on what the platform needs to support next.

What You'll Be Building

• Build and lead a team of 10 to 15 engineers, including managers and tech leads. Hire, develop, and retain engineers at every level.
• Set multi-year technical vision and strategy for hybrid edge and cloud infrastructure across distributed lab sites.
• Own platform roadmap and delivery, shipping on a predictable cadence against commitments made to partner teams.
• Own fleet operations and reliability, including service levels, on-call, and incident response across sites.
• Own infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor relationships.
• Partner cross-functionally with robotics, lab operations, research, and security, and communicate platform strategy and tradeoffs to executives.
• Raise the engineering bar through standards, review practices, and technical thought leadership.

What You'll Need to Succeed

• 15+ years in software or infrastructure engineering, with 8+ years leading teams, including managing managers or tech leads, or equivalent practical experience.
• Track record building and scaling a platform or infrastructure organization from a small team upward.
• Deep technical grounding in hybrid on-premises and cloud infrastructure, including Kubernetes operated at scale outside the public cloud.
• Experience operating production fleets against explicit reliability targets, with ownership of on-call and incident practice.
• Ownership of infrastructure budget, capacity planning, and vendor negotiation.
• Proven cross-functional and executive partnership, including communicating technical tradeoffs to non-engineering leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to hire and develop senior and principal-level engineers.

Bonus Points For

• Scientific domain: laboratory automation, robotics, or hardware-adjacent platforms; lab software for life sciences or materials science.
• Distributed and edge systems: multi-site operations, intermittently connected environments, over-the-air software rollout.
• Security and compliance: identity and secrets management across hybrid environments, operating in regulated or audited settings.
• Platform practice: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, developer experience as a product, AI-assisted engineering workflows adopted across a team.
• Organizational: standing up a new function, integrating acquired or transferred teams, managing a team split across offices and remote.